This is what Sparrow was referring to:

There is a case where a 15-year-old Irish immigrant, Phoebe Prince, was bullied and harassed by a group of students at school. It was apparently common knowledge at the school. She eventually hung herself.

The students who were found to be her bullies are facing criminal charges in her death, and a debate is currently going on as to whether the school staff knew about it and did nothing, and if they should face criminal charges as well.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...teenage_cy.html

As for my opinion, absolutely they should face charges. If you run an office, and someone slips and falls, because you didn't put up a sign, they are liable to sue you. If you know of a crime that has been committed, and do not report it, you are liable for jurisdiction in a court of law; possibly even prison. If this stuff was going on in their school, and they knew about it but did nothing, they are absolutely liable for the full extent of criminal law. They are accessories to a criminal act (I think that's the charge I'm thinking of, anyway). They are in charge of providing safety of their students.

EDIT: There are also other cases as well of students being bullied to the point of committing suicide. I'm just unfamiliar with those ones.

You'll note, however, the actual charges aren't about "bullying" directly, they're the specific criminal acts that happened in the course of the bullying. If there was a "was very mean to her" criminal charge in there I must have missed it. In my opinion it's nearly always legal and protected speech to be an ass to someone if you're so inclined, and I disagree with laws that occasionally seek to change that, but you're later charged with a crime related to how you've been a big abusive douche to someone it's absolutely fair game to push it as motive and frame of mind. I wouldn't mind if the wide range of defendants in the case got nice fat felony records out of it because they obviously went beyond the bounds that are repeatedly underscored in the article (but which are mostly protected speech) but I think it's a stretch to call for the manslaughter charges that some people would likely call for. The girl hung herself, that much doesn't seem to be in question. She might have been driven to despair by criminal acts, but in the end she took the final step herself and pushing responsibility for that onto others seems to ignore all of the despondent, bullied teenagers out there who manage to not string themselves up.

On the other hand, civil liability is a different animal entirely. It wouldn't surprise me if the school district, specific teachers, the arrested students, and the arrested students parents, were all taken to the cleaners in the lawsuits that will surely follow.

Being the subject of relentless bullying throughout school, most of it just verbal abuse, I hope the school officials get charged with misconduct or something and are fired and banned from teaching, administrating or whatever position it is that they are currently holding. While on the premises of a public school, it is the responsibility of all teaching staff and administrators to keep the students safe, which clearly didn't happen. I also hope that the evil brat kids that are charged don't just get a smack on the hand.

Mistermook, I think the problem here is that verbal abuse is being called freedom of speech. If a spouse verbally abuses their spouse, it is grounds for divorce and even a restraining order. Why isn't verbal abuse punished when used by teenagers. There should be consequences when someone chooses to verbally abuse another person. This shouldn't have been tolerated in the name of freedom of speech. We (staff, parents, etc involved in this case) can't all be ignorant enough to not see the difference and react accordingly. Not only that, but this 'bullying' wasn't only in the verbal form, but in the form of physical assaults, as well.

They should only be charged for the physical assault. That is a crime. The rest isn't and shouldn't be.

Don't know about where you live, but my High School has had a "zero tolerance" policy for the last 23 years now. This includes verbal assault. Any words, threats, or actions that are construed as bullying are punished severely. A bully is suspended for the first offence, and expelled on the second. Recently the policy has been expanded to include "cyberbullying".

As for freedom of speech, it should be tempered with responsibility for it to be most useful to us. If you choose to take the freedom but reject the responsibility that needs to go with it, then you will find that, very soon, you will get into situations where your physical freedom might be challenged.

Any form of bullying is not to be tolerated.

The most recent suicide data for the US:

Last edited by kattenijin : 8th Apr 2010 at 10:41 AM.

For the record, freedom of speech does have exceptions in hate speech and threats. These forms of speech are -not- protected.

There is a fine line between petty bullying and criminal behavior. In this case, they certainly crossed that line because of the physical assault. I don't think that "bullying" itself is a crime, though. In cases where it is merely verbal assault, it can't impact the target of the bullying any more than they let it. I was teased in elementary and middle school, but I shrugged it off because it's not worth it to let other people control you. People will be jerks, and you can't go and sue everyone who says mean things to you.

I think that the school administrators should have paid better attention to what was going on because, to a certain degree, they are responsible for the children while the children are on school grounds. However, the school is not responsible for the suicide, nor are the children who bullied the girl. They are responsible for the physical assault, which they should definitely be punished for, but they didn't make the girl commit suicide. The girl who committed suicide made that choice and it was her responsibility even if the other kids were making her life miserable.

I think that too many people are thin-skinned and think they are entitled to an easy life. Life is difficult and we just have to learn to deal with it. It's sad that she died, but its also sad that the the other students are likely to be adversely affected in their prosecution by the strong emotional undercurrent to this story.



If you had a bad day and mouthed off to someone who was annoying you, how would you feel if they tried to have you charged with "bullying"? It's in our nature that everyone has their bad days and ends up acting like an ass from time to time. If we as a society are so thin-skinned that we can't ignore the occasional person letting off some steam, we are going to end up with a lot of people with criminal records. I understand that this situation was a little more than just someone letting off steam, but based on what you are saying, you think that we should be held to an impossible standard that punishes those with and without malicious intent.

That is a couple of 'if's' that likely wouldn't occur. I've had plenty of bad days. People annoy me in general, but I don't mouth off to people because I'm having a bad day and people annoy me. Otherwise all I'd do is mouth off. All.day.long. It's hard to say, hypothetically, (since that is what you ask of me to do) what would happen after hypothetical events that would never happen.

Back on topic: This girl was endlessly bullied. It isn't like it happened once per week, once per day, in just one place. It was over the internet, in person, at school, in the neighborhood, incessant, constant, everywhere, all the time. That is not just one moment of being mouthed off because you annoyed someone. This is constant harassment and abuse. The two situations are nowhere near comparable. Anyone who suffered this intense level of bullying would be affected. I would not accuse the victim of being thin-skinned in this circumstance. A person would have to be inhuman to be unaffected, or sociopathic.

Your final statement is so far off base from my point, it doesn't warrant comment.

If bullying is a form of abuse then doesn't that make bullying a crime? That's the way I see it. If someone "mouthed off" at me once because they were in a bad mood, I'd put it down to just that, they were in a bad mood. But if someone said horrible things to me constantly and for no reason other than to be mean then I'd call that bullying and report them, because even though I've never been to bothered about people saying things I know that some people aren't as strong as that, so what might not bother me might emotionally cripple someone else. Bullying is a crime because it can ruin a persons life in the same way being mugged or raped can, it just depends on the who the victim is and the amount of bullying. Like I said, myself, I can shake it off, but their are people I know who were badly affected by bullying, and that was just verbal abuse, she lost all her confidence and started self harming and has attempted suicide.

And yeah, the teachers and other school staff should be charged as accessories because they could have stopped it but they didn't. Now that girl is dead.
If this case were in the form of a picture, it would be an image of the bullies hanging the girl themselves while the teachers stand there and watch. And that is how they should be charged.

I was speaking in the general sense when I was talking about people being thin-skinned. I was talking about people who want to prosecute for things like "cyberbullying" and general verbal abuse. I think these are things that happen and that a mature and rational person would ignore. And I do think that it is possible for children to be rational about it. This case clearly went above and beyond, as I stated, as it involved physical abuse as well. I can understand someone being affected to some degree by this level of bullying, but I can't understand committing suicide over it. And I can't see anything even approaching suicide in cases where the abuse is merely verbal.

I think some people are allowing themselves to take this case a little bit too personally and without a lot of thought about the implications in the law, and are coming off a little histrionic.

Let me put it this way: If we chose to view this sort of behavior as having an inevitable, or even very possible, response of suicide, then we will by precedence allow a defense for murder for someone bullying. That is, you'd be essentially saying that someone could simply make someone feel bad enough and hurt their feelings enough that their lives were construed to be in danger and a rational, legally protected response would be to kill the verbal abuser.

Mind you, there's already a legal threshold in place for verbal assault with specific intent to harm in some jurisdictions. If I tell someone I'm going to shoot them, and I have a gun, then they're well within their rights to shoot me first in self defense. What some of you seem to be pursuing is lowering that bar further. If I called you fat three times, (four? what's the limit) then you could argue that you felt fat enough to take your own life, and therefore were justified in shooting me in self-defense. That's the sort of thing you're really discussing when you're engaging in this call to collect charges on the non-physical allegations involved and folding the suicide as a criminal act.

Have a bad childhood? Kill yourself? Your parents committed manslaughter, congratulations! Or you could just kill them since you considered suicide, what the hell, right? Bad boss? Shoot the bastard, because you've got a ready made defense in "he made me feel bad, and when I feel bad I feel like killing myself." Hell, since suicide is a death we could backlog the courts with suicide cases - someone made those poor suicidal folks feel bad enough to kill themselves, and that's a manslaughter charge for someone. You'd nearly have to pursue it as a DA, because otherwise your violent crime figures would skyrocket. You'd be scooping up cheerleaders who didn't speak to smart kids and models who made cheerleaders feel ugly, all potential felons by the insane reasoning you guys seem to be proposing. The threshold for abusive speech becoming criminal is high for a reason. Free speech is there for a reason. There's a reason why verbal assault has a very specific threshold, and why people who commit suicide kill themselves and we don't accuse other people of killing people who don't, you know, actually do any killing.

They're charging lots of people with very real crimes. Some of them will likely stick with a death involved, possibly even after the appeals process. The students and administrators who did this and let this happen? They are not going to be having happy lives for the next three to six years even if they get off scott free.

But maybe some of them will kill themselves, and we can charge the gal who committed suicide with killing them by making them sad back...

One thing that you seem to look over is that there is already laws in place(may just be states laws but there are laws) regarding verbal abuse. Slander is just one form of verbal abuse(though not necessarily always verbal) that is punishable by law, though only a misdemeanor. Sexual harassment, be it verbal or physical, is also punishable by law. There seems to be a whole lot of looking away from what minors do to other minors, they may be minors, but they should be held accountable for anything and everything they do that physically or emotional harms someone else.

No I'm not overlooking existing laws. That's why I mentioned the existing laws on verbal assault in my message. If you'd like I'll bring it up a lot more explicitly and talk about it at length so that I can devote an entire post the nature and extent of verbal abuse laws? I thought about it but I decided it would be be more effective to draw attention to the effect that changing the limitations of such laws by the implied precedent that's effectively been called for being set here? I'm not a lawyer of course, or else I wouldn't be talking about the law here for free, but it's not like the law is particularly complex once you get the hang of reading statutes and doing your research, and I'm one of those weird people who actually digs reading legal documents given the right mood. It's the way the world works.

Slander and defamation have a different, even higher, thresholds for prosecution. You're not going to use slander and defamation laws here to effectively punish anyone, except perhaps in a case where one of the defendants is mistakenly identified by the press and someone completely innocent gets thrown through the wringer of the public eye. I'm uncertain if the prosecution has standing to make a slander case on the behalf of an alleged victim either, or if the statute of limitations (one year) has passed for a slander case. Defamation cases have "opinion" defenses too, the threshold of which decreases with intimacy called privilege - your mother calling you a whore is less likely to be regarded as opinion than if I do it. Since none of the participants seem to be friends or have much more in common than a shared battleground of words in the school, it's hard to imagine the opinion defense not being effective. In any case the penalty is merely a fine, and there are more serious charges on the table here. Making slander charges in this case would something like writing a bank robber a parking ticket.

Sexual harassment laws are powerful things, but I'm fairly certain they're inapplicable to anyone but the school officials and the threshold there seems to be established as "deliberate indifference" or "actual knowledge" of a sexual harassment situation. Since most of the charges and allegations in the case seem to involve verbal confrontations without sexual overtones as far as I can see though, I can understand it if school officials didn't see a responsibility to step in. You might be confusing sexual harassment charges that might be leveled at the school with the underlying sexual assaults that might prompt sexual harassment for indifference allegations. Again though, there seems to be at least two rape charges already on the table here. I don't see where the police are missing anything, especially since the rapes are specifically characterized as "date rapes." Unless the school officials turned a blind eye to a date rape they were notified of or had some knowledge about on school ground or at a school function though, I'm not sure why they would be charged with harassment - and in any case, in such an instance I'm fairly certain the other circumstances of the case would progress the charges beyond the simple responsibility for harassment given the more serious nature of the crime.

Would you like me to consider other possible crimes I might be forgetting? Possibly they should charge one of the girls with littering when she allegedly threw the soda at the other girl?

Look...I get it that people want to be outraged about this, but letting yourself be outraged into making outrageous legal arguments just ends up wasting taxpayer money and probably doesn't make for a very good case where any sort of justice is done. A couple of rape charges and assault with a deadly weapon, with a dead girl to play sympathy with, is not the sort of thing people shrug off easily. Dead students don't ever look good for school officials no matter how they get there. In the best of results for the alleged perpetrators of the crimes they're going to be dragged through the press as villains even if they walk.

And yeah, no matter how you parse it -none of these cruel, malicious people killed the girl. That's all on her, whether you like it or not.

I wasn't saying charge anyone with sexual harassment, just stating that sexual harassment can be verbal abuse. The school officials should be held accountable for everything that happened to the girl at the school under their watch. While none of the kids actually killed the girl they played a part in her death, they were the cause and the girl killing herself was the effect of the kids' harassment and abuse, from my understanding. The girl however shouldn't have killed herself, she should've told someone about the abuse she was receiving that way her death could've been prevented.

The school officials should not be held accountable to the same level as the kids who bullied the girl. They were negligent, but negligence isn't as bad as action with intent. I think that saying that the bullying "caused" her death is an improper use of the word. Their actions were part of the girl's consideration about committing suicide, but she is the one who chose to kill herself, so the only direct cause of her death is on her.

It may not be the direct cause of her suicide but they seemed to have driven her to that point, so they did inadvertently cause her death by their relentless abuse.

Not in any real legal sense though. Some of them are facing felony charges, I'm just not sure what the "it's not enough!" crowd wants more than that. There's surely going to be a round of civil suits following the criminal court cases too.

It's like they saying they're gonna hang them and everyone's calling for them to be drowned also, and perhaps fined five dollars for not washing their hands. Justice is being pursued and there are serious charges being waved around, the additional responses to the actions seem nonsensical or impractical.

I'm not sure where my professor got this information, but she claims that this bullying case, while unfortunate, is a media overhype of bullying, especially in the case of female bullying. She claimed statistics said that women committing such offenses has actually dropped in the past decades, as opposed to risen.

True, but it's not as simple. These kinds of things can end up in court, where a legal decision must be made as to whether or not the person said or did not say something, and if it falls under First Amendment protections or not. Just take a look at the case against the Westboro Baptists.

What I don't understand, is why are they considering charges against the school, but not against Phoebe's parents? (Bear with me here, I will make a point..) Certainly, the school is responsible for the safety of the students, and can be charged accordingly if anything goes wrong. Parents are responsible for their child's safety, and as well can be charged accordingly if something goes wrong. And something did go wrong. This poor girl was relentlessly abused and not one person stepped in and tried to make it right. Why was she not put in another school, or put into therapy? Or homeschooled, or..? I just can't fathom a child being SO SAD as to commit SUICIDE...that wasn't showing some form of sadness in her everyday actions.

I was bullied as a child, and thankfully it didn't go this far. But my mom DID notice a change in me at home, and she put me in therapy to deal with it. My mother saved me. Unfortunately for Phoebe, no one noticed in time.

Fregglerock, I totally agree that her parents have some responsibility here, as well. The apathy of all involved is so sad and disappointing. So many people, admittedly the school staff, knew what was going on and chose to not care.

I dunno what CT said, but now I'm really really curious.

To the point, however, for those who are not aware of the current case, the Westboro Baptist Church is an extremely anti-gay group who has gone around to soldier's funerals to protest homosexuality with very controversial signs.

A case was filed against them, from the father who's son's funeral was protested at. He won, the Westboro Baptists filed an appeal, and instead won the appeal, reversing the decision with a court order of the father to pay their legal fees.

The court argument is heavily involved in regards to First Amendment rights, and whether or not their protest qualified as hate speech or not.

Again though, neither words nor indifference/neglect made a direct result of the girl's death, since she killed herself. Words don't do actual harm in terms of murder cases, though they can establish motive, frame of mind, and probably will make a very real, powerful impact in the accompanying civil case. The parent's responsibilities will likely get brought up as a matter of defense, but as to why they're not directly responsible... Who really wants to arrest parents who have just had their daughter commit suicide? I mean, really, what does that accomplish?

There would have to be a really, really clear documented path of responsibility like "Early that afternoon she told her mother several times: Mother, I am going to kill myself tonight. She then followed it up with asking her father for a high chair and a bit of twine, which he gave to her without comment, except for to show her the proper way to tie a knot that wouldn't slip off of a corpse's neck." You do hear about parents like that sometimes, but they're not the norm. And in this case, any break in the chain of responsibility to people other than the bullies just muddles the issue. It's not a tool of the prosecution really, it's a point for the defense. You'll want to look to paint the bullies as callous and everyone else as clueless or having taken ineffective steps to correct the behaviors, a pattern of breaking socially accepted boundaries from the bullies. You can't pin the criminal murder on the other kids, but I'm fairly sure you can seriously imply about it and push the limits of "these lesser crimes are just the ones they've been caught at, they're really horrible people who will commit more serious crimes eventually because they lack boundaries and empathy."